“You are.”
Now, only her second time inside his house, his kids chattering in a nearby room, she felt butterflies. They were standing close together in the doorway that led from the mudroom, and Jess knew that he would never take one more step without removing his shoes, not even by accident. How appalled he’d probably be if he could peek inside her memories and see her house in high school, her brother’s cleats leaving little perforated chunks of grass and dried mud all over the house, the sink always full of food scraps that her mother cleared out with her fingers bent like a claw.
Meeting out as they’d been doing, hours stolen here and there, meant they always arrived at each other already armored. Neil clean-shaven and impeccable in a white dress shirt, his watch peeking out from beneath his cuff whenever he reached for anything. Jess in mascara, a pencil skirt, a swipe of lip gloss, three dots of concealer under each eye, expertly blended so that there was never any line. But at home, the gold seams of his dress socks against ceramic tile, the vulnerable looseness of his neck that she never noticed before that moment, she wasn’t so sure she wanted that layer exposed. As she got to know him better, she got a strong impression of habits that would reveal themselves more fully with time. “His ways,” her mother would say. Neil’s ways were to press the door closed behind him until it clicked and then press a moment longer to be sure; to immediately look around with an eye out for what needed to be tidied; to lick his thumb and rub a spot on the mudroom wainscoting that only he could see; to carefully place his briefcase on the end of the bench and then look to see where Jess placed hers.
These small things, she knew, were the end of a vein that ran strong and deep through the bedrock of his personality. She brought a cup of coffee into his car once, when he was a few minutes early picking her up, and after looking at it he said, “Yeah, that’s fine,” as if Jess had asked. I don’t know him, she reminded herself then and now. Not really.
Since stepping inside his home, all she could think about was Malcolm, whether he’d heard yet, if it were still possible that he had not, how she would tell him. Now that she was back in Gillam, Malcolm close by somewhere, she felt all the guilt she’d been holding at bay come sweeping over her. That the bar was struggling, that he’d gotten them into something she hadn’t agreed to—that was old information. There was no need to get mad all over again. She pictured him taking the news of her and Neil by crossing his arms and refusing to look at her. Every other man in the world would have guessed, but Malcolm? It probably hadn’t entered his mind.
“Come on,” Neil said, when she said that to him. But it was true. Malcolm never imagined people doing things to him that he wouldn’t do to them. Look at Hugh.
“You’ve said he’s cocky. There you go, I guess,” Neil said. And it was the strangest thing, every time Neil even hinted that he agreed with her assessment of Malcolm, she wanted to shift it so he’d understand that he’d never have it exactly right. Malcolm had good reason to be cocky. He was handsome and charming, and when he loved a person he loved that person with his whole heart. He wasn’t demonstrative, but he never complained about anything, ever, and he was always there where you expected him to be. It was why his friends loved him, it was why they’d stuck by him for forty years. In this dramatic divorce, where Neil’s ex was in the complete wrong according to him, who’d gotten all the mutual friends? It was a detail that only occurred to Jess recently.
It was weird to think that their friends and neighbors still saw Malcolm all the time, that in the last four months he must have brought in the mail and put gas in his car and bought his usual weekly roundup of scratch-offs. He must have put up Christmas lights and taken them down and carried the ladder on his shoulder. She hadn’t seen any of it, but other people had. Thinking about it gave her the same feeling she got when she jolted awake at night to save herself from falling.
She followed Neil down the hall to the kitchen, where the babysitter was lining dirty dishes in the dishwasher. When Neil referenced the sitter, Jess had pictured a teenager. But of course a teenager had to be in school, couldn’t mind children all day. This was a grown woman. Her face rang a bell; Jess either had overlapped with her in high school or had seen her at the Half Moon. Jess hung back, inspected the recessed lighting as if she were there to redecorate the place, to take a few measurements and head out. Neil told the sitter not to worry about the dishes, that she could go, but right in front of her he quickly turned the plates to face the direction opposite to the way she’d loaded them.
Maybe he was fastidious to a fault and he’d get that way with her, too—her body and her habits. By the time she stepped inside Neil’s house, they’d been together in hotel rooms, in his office after hours, in his friend’s empty beach house. Almost but not quite in a loaner Jeep when they drove upstate, his car at the dealer for new brakes. Twice at Cobie’s when Jess had the place to herself for a weekend, Cobie and family in Texas for a wedding. He hadn’t liked that, being in someone else’s home, said it made him feel jumpy. But five minutes inside his home, the place where he clipped his nails and nodded off in front of the television, already felt far more private than any of those encounters. She looked away from the kitchen cabinets, where he kept his alternate flours and his vitamins. She looked away from the books piled on the fireplace mantel in case she caught a glimpse of Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman.
“I got snipped,” he said at one point, fairly early on. “You haven’t asked but you should know. In case you were worried. Or in case you were hoping—”
It was right around the time they began discussing the idea that whatever was between them wasn’t just a passing thing, that they should probably own it, give it a chance to live. “You should know I’m not up for that.”
“No, of course not,” she said, but saying it aloud left her with that same bereft feeling she thought she’d left behind, like wandering into a pocket of cold air.
“Anyway the problem was me. With all that. Not—”
But she didn’t want to say Malcolm’s name. Didn’t want to bring a thought of him into the room, not in this context, not with this person who’d given himself the freedom to have a few thoughts about what had happened between her and Malcolm, what had gone wrong.
“I have no hope of getting pregnant. Don’t worry.”
But she did have hope—vague, unreasonable. It wasn’t the main draw, but it was there for sure. Nothing concrete, just a passing thought: maybe. A new person, a new combination. What did the private discussion rooms agree on if not this: conception was a mysterious process. She only called herself on it when he told her about the vasectomy and she examined her disappointment. Still, there were the kids already born. The kids who needed a mother more than two weekends a month.
When they walked into the family room, the kids didn’t move. The TV was tuned to a woman dressed like a child, dancing.
“You guys,” Neil said. “This is Jess.”
“We’ve met Jess,” said the older one.
“At Cara’s house, right?” Jess said. Cara was Patrick and Siobhán’s youngest child, the one who lined up with this girl. Suddenly, Jess saw the other way the whole town would find out. This girl would tell everyone in school, and the teachers would hear, most of whom had grown up in Gillam.
“Yup,” the girl said. “I remember you from there.”
“But you haven’t formally met,” Neil said.
“We have, actually,” the girl said.
Well, well, Jess thought.